Joyce Carol Oates: "As a writer, I put my faith in people" | Louisiana Channel

“What is so exciting about the novel is that it mimics life and that you end up doing something you never thought you would do,” says Joyce Carol Oates, one of America’s greatest living novelists, when looking back on a life of writing.

When writing, Joyce Carol Oates writes about people, often about a family, because “the family unit to me is like the nexus of all emotion, and people derive their meaning from the position in families,” she says. It might be a violent event or something politically relevant, or it could be a racist experience that sets off a novel.

In her storytelling, Oates finds it interesting to focus on girls at the beginning of puberty: “There's a kind of wonderful neutrality of childhood that gets conditioned out when girls get to be 12 - 14 years old. And then, from that point on, when they're so shaped by what we call the male gaze and the expectations of others that they grow into being someone who is this female image.”

But today, the family is very different and there are all kinds of families: “There are families of same-sex couples who got married and they may adopt a child or they may have a child of their own, but then there may be families that are like communes where people are living, sharing a house, but they are a family and they may have dogs and cats who know who they are. […] The so-called nuclear family – which is just a father, mother, and children – still exists, of course, but it's not the only example of any longer, which is wonderful. It all begins with the emancipation of women”, Joyce Carol Oates concludes.

Oates feels attracted to writing because writing is storytelling and “what's interesting about storytelling is that you have to have revelations. That you start off with a situation, and a little bit of a mystery evolves, and then you have to follow the tendrils and the roots of that mystery, like an investigator. And then there has to be a revelation.” This means that Oates focuses a lot in her writing on the pacing and the suspense and the movement, like “how long is a paragraph, how short is the dialogue, and how much dialogue is there in proportion to the exposition, and the craftsman side of writing is actually where many people write.“

When looking upon the time we live in novelists and historians have two different approaches: “Historians write books about things that happen. When we're alive, when we live through an experience, we don't really know what it is 20 years from now. If we read about our lives now, we're learning much more,” Joyce Carol Oates says.

Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938) is an award-winning American author, who has published a large number of novels, plays, novellas, short stories, poetry and nonfiction. Among her books are ‘them’ (1969), ‘Black Water’ (1992), ‘Demon and other tales’ (1996), ‘Blonde’ (2000), ‘The Falls’ (2004), ‘Black Dahlia & White Rose’ (2012) and ‘The Accursed’ (2013), which writer Stephen King described as “the world’s first postmodern Gothic novel.” ‘Babysitter’ was published in 2022. She has won numerous awards, including the National Book Award (1969), two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal (2010), the Norman Mailer Prize (2012) and many more. Three of her novels, ‘Black Water’ (1992), ‘What I Lived For’ (1994) and ‘Blonde’ (2000), have been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

Joyce Carol Oates was interviewed by Elisabeth Skou Pedersen in connection to the Louisiana Literature festival at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark in August 2023.

Camera: Simon Weyhe
Edit: Signe Boe Pedersen
Produced by Christian Lund

Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2023

Louisiana Channel is supported by Den A.P. Møllerske Støttefond, Ny Carlsbergfondet and C.L. Davids Fond og Samling.

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